On July 10, Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel condemned the US for denying the Cuban people oxygen as the Delta variant of COVID-19 ran rampant across the country in 2021. Cuba’s only oxygen plant had to cease production because it could not acquire spare parts due to the US blockade against Cuba.
“We will never forget the genocidal act of the US Government when, with its blockade policy, it denied and hindered the acquisition of oxygen for the people of Cuba, in the midst of the worst moment of the pandemic, when our only plant broke down,” wrote Díaz-Canel on Twitter on Monday. “That’s how real and criminal the [blockade] is.”
The blockade also made it impossible for Cuba to import medical oxygen. “Anyone having any doubts about our assertion that the blockade, as established by Article II (b) and (c) of the Convention on the Crime of Genocide, qualifies as an act of genocide, because it intended to cause deliberate mental and physical damage to a community and jeopardize its living conditions, should have dispelled all of them during the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Cuban foreign minister Bruno Rodríguez in an intervention in Cuba’s National Assembly on May 25, 2023. “The initial measure was to ban imports of any sort by Cuba, particularly to prevent the import of mechanical ventilators. There were measures against the scaling-up of Cuban vaccine production, because for that we required equipment, spare parts, supplies, and products. There were measures to prevent importation of oxygen from third countries.”
“It became clear that it was not possible to import medicines from the United States; that it was not possible to import oxygen during the pandemic from the United States without a specific license from the US government,” he said. “There can be no doubt about the deliberately cruel and genocidal character of the blockade.”
According to Rodríguez, “Attempts to import [medical oxygen] from the US were unsuccessful, as a specific license was needed, which requires the approval of at least 5 US federal agencies.”
Despite the blockade, Cuba was able to develop five of its own COVID-19 vaccines, and only suffered 8,530 deaths due to the virus versus the US, which suffered over one million deaths. In other words, in Cuba, approximately eight people per 10,000 living on the island died from COVID-19, whereas in the US, approximately 34 per 10,000 died from the disease.
